Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Matisse. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Matisse Quotes And Sayings by 93 Authors including Henry Miller,David Arnold,Brander Matthews,Vincent Van Gogh,Bridget Riley for you to enjoy and share.

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The practice of any art demands more than 'mere savoir faire'. One must not only be in love with what one does, one must also know how to make love. In love self is obliterated. Only the beloved counts.
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I'm a Picasso, not a Vermeer
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In every artist we can perceive a man with both a message and a method. His message may be innate in him, but his method he has to acquire from others.
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The great artist is the simplifier.
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An artist's early work is inevitably made up of a mixture of tendencies and interests, some of which are compatible and some of which are in conflict.
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I don't know much about modern art, but I guess I am modern art.
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His work kept on living, like the watches on the wrists of dead soldiers. [Said of Marcel Proust]
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Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.
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One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism.
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The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats.
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The score of Pelleas and Melisande by Debussy, heralds that which will lift man from the earthly to the celestial, from the mortal to the immortal. Once again the ways of the artist and healer are merging.
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How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
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An artist is one of two things: he is either a high priest, or a more or less smart entertainer. - GIUSEPPE MAZZINI
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Those who are not conversant in works of art are often surprised at the high value set by connoisseurs on drawings which appear careless, and in every respect unfinished; but they are truly valuable ... they give the idea of a whole.
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Picasso has been my inspiration, expressing himself in a hundred different ways.
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Almost every evening, either I went to [Georges] Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other's work. A canvas wasn't finished unless both of us felt it was.
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If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.
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True art was more than beauty; it was more than technique. It was not just imitation.
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Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.
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Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated.
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Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.
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I love Monet - I've nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it's a series of blobs - amazing.
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Sometimes it's better to live through someone's work than the person themselves, and to realise that every human being is flawed, but through art they can be perfect.
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Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.
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Monet was like a conductor. He painted with quite a straight arm and used bold strokes.
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Art should grasp the mind the way the vagina grasps the penis-Marcel Duchamp
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The activity of painting: A thrilling tussle between the artist's materials and his inspiration.
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Art is not just about what's great or expensive or scandalous or famous. It's a mirror we hold up that looks different to everyone who sees it, and whose beauty lies as much in us, and our capacity to dream ...
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Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility); a dismantling of the artist's competence, his responsible sense of vocation - and therefore as an aggression against them. Modern
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The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.
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Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.
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Artists copy the pictures of those they admire, those they aspire to, acknowledged masters whose work embodies everything they hope to achieve
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In the dream world of Matisse and the gritty reality of American frontier, the diversity of women in our society offers the chance for greater exploration and even greater inspiration.
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Richard Serra, the great sculptor, personifies an artist for me.
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All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.
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The form and color which guide men experienced in the study of the masters are not always recognized by laymen. Yet they can feel the genuineness of an artist's response to the life they know.
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Real beauty in the arts is eternal and would be accepted at all periods; but it wears the dress of its century: something of that dress clings to it, and woe to the works which appear in periods when the general taste is corrupted.
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It quite often makes me feel sad that painting's like a bad mistress one might have, who's always spending, spending and it's never enough.. [Letter 630, Arles, 23 June 1888]
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What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.
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Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes ... has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition.
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One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.
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I paint only what I love.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
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I noticed that the large windows between the paintings [in the Musee d'Art Moderne] interested me more than the art exhibited. From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me.
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The artist is not born to a life of pleasure. He must not live idle; he has a hard work to perform, and one which often proves a cross to be borne.
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I'm a big fan of Edouard Vuillard, so I'd like anything by him - particularly a painting called 'Madame Hessel on the Sofa.' His work is realistic without being literal: I can really imagine what Madame Hessel is thinking.
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To the memory of Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, El Greco, and many others who came before me as well as those who will come after. We are one. Thank you.
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Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.
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Precaution the Cuticle of a Grand Piano. Modern art [by Salvador Dali].
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whose work also hangs in numerous museums.
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The artist is today and has been for many years, despite his absence of merit, simply a spoiled child. So many honors, so much money bestowed on men without souls and without education.
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Delphine Lucielle's paintings are profound, unique, and moving. It is rare to find contemporary art that combines both beauty, innovation, and creates a new style of painting by fusing technology and nature. Delphine Lucielle is pushing the boundaries of what art is capable of.
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Nobody is fully alive who cannot apply to art as much discrimination and appreciation as he applies to the work by which he earns his living.
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To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
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He had come abroad to enjoy the Flemish painters and all others; but what fair-tressed saint of Van Eyck or Memling was so interesting a figure as Madame de Mauves?
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When we neglect the artist in ourselves, there is a kind of mourning that goes on under the surface of our busy lives.
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I studied all about Gauguin. He was a banker. He was a banker who - he used to paint on Sundays. And one day he hated himself for painting on Sundays.
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What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.
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Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life. It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul?
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Who will dare say he has defined art?
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The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination.
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Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.
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Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people - more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true - in certain rare, isolated cases.
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Art brings out the grand lines of nature. Antione Bourdelle
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It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess.
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Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.
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The artist is justified by his art.
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The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves one perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissarro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root.
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The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself.
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The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.
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For the love of his art
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How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.
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Love them all," said Renoir. "That is the secret, young man. Love them all." The painter let go of his arm and shrugged. "Then, even if your paintings are shit, you will have loved them all.
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Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares-and who has once broken the spell of 'you can't.'
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You will think less of the art, when you know the artist
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Art and the artist meet in stages, slowly revealing themselves until both are satisfied with what the other has become.
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The wretched beings depicted by Millet touch us profoundly because he loved them profoundly. They have nothing in common with vulgar ugliness. Beauty will always remain the highest aim of art.
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About 1883 something like a break occurred in my work. I had reached the end of 'impressionism,' and I had come to realize that I did not know how to paint or draw.
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The portrait is one of the most curious art forms. It demands special qualities in the artist, and an almost total kinship with the model.
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Art feasts upon its maker, I
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I like a lot of modern art. I like Chuck Close a lot. It doesn't necessarily directly influence the work I draw on the page.
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We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed.
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Almost every artistic nature is born with a revealing connoisseurial tendency that appreciates injustice so long as it results in beauty and applauds, even worships aristocratic privilege.
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A peculiar work in any art must not be too hastily judged. New styles have to create new tastes.
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Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
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The best painters, as they progress in reputation and towards perfection, are found to dispense more and more with the technique of the art, for simpler methods. Simplicity never fails to charm.
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The true artist can only labor con amore.
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Every work of art is the child of its time, often it is the mother of our emotions.
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Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.
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I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.
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There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.
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A painter must compensate the natural deficiencies of his art. He has but one sentence to utter, but one moment to exhibit. He cannot, like the poet or historian, expatiate, and impress the mind ...
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Goyen there. Sadly not for sale." "Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot." "From here, yes, you might." He was pleased at the comparison. "Very similar painters - Vincent
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True art is reverent imitation of God.
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Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.
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Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary ...
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An aged painter cannot help but accept the fact that his work belongs in the past. Younger painters have leaped into the phenomenon called contemporary, where it would be foolish of me to try to enter. But I can claim my own phenomenon ...
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Art is not an amusement, nor a distraction, nor is it, as many men maintain, an escape from life. On the contrary, it is a high training of the soul, essential to the soul's growth, to its unfoldment.
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Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.
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Whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.
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I can't paint as well as Vermeer.